Born in the bicultural/bilingual setting of El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Chihuahua, attended the University of Texas El Paso, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, & the University of Oregon. Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept.

About Me

Rafael Jesús González, born in the bicultural/bilingual setting of El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Chihuahua, attended the University of Texas El Paso, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, & the University of Oregon. Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, he has taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland (where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept.)
He has thrice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He was Poet in Residence at the Oakland Museum of California and the Oakland Public Library under the Poets & Writers “Writers on Site” award in 1996. He served as contributing editor for The Montserrat Review and received the Annual Dragonfly Press Award for Literary Achievement in 2002. In 2003 he was honored by the National Council of Teachers of English & Annenberg/CPB for his writing. In June 2007, he was honored for excellence in poetry at the 20th World Congress of Poets, Montgomery, Alabama.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Moonlight floods the room and won't let me sleep, the moon in the window, a big silver dollar. The All-Mighty Dollar, one might say, except that a single dollar won't buy much of anything anymore. But if one has many dollars — say millions, billions — they will buy a government, a country, and in this global age, a world to be eaten, devoured, its bones picked clean: its food poisoned, and torn apart and poisoned the soil that bears it; its water poisoned and dammed and sold for profit; its air poisoned by waste; fire made unholy by the bombs and missiles rained upon those who won't do as we want.

The supreme court of the land has decreed what we already knew: that money talks. And by some logic, I suppose, that talk is speech. And being speech, that it must be free of all restraint to have its say. And so, if you have a lot of dough, you may out-shout all others and drown their voices with your lies. That's what it said.

And now, with 40% of the nation's wealth in the hands of the 1% fortunate (or predatory) enough to have it, we face off in an unfair shouting match, with big voices the haves and the have-nots virtually mute, with many of the haves-some caught scared in the middle. These, though their some be much reduced and dwindling day by day, may refuse to believe that their some may come to none, and victims of their own myths and against their own interests, side with the filthy rich.

So it is, the moon reminds me, in this land of the free, this home of the brave. In the midst of the din, it may behoove us to stop our ears enough to think a bit and according to our lights choose between the Democrats (of some conscience and more responsive to the have-nots and haves-some) and the Republicans (totally committed to the haves). The choice is not as great as we would wish it (both are committed to the broken and unviable economics of Capitalism and empire) but it is very clear.

The indifferent moon, pitilessly depriving me of sleep, does not care a whit whether we live or die, go extinct as the dinosaurs or thrive. It is up to us and no one else; we must go out and occupy the voting booths throughout the land — and through them occupy the White House, the Senate, Congress, and all else. It is not a matter of the flip of a coin, penny or dollar (such implies equal impartiality; there is none) — it is a matter of will. We must, like this flood of moonlight in the room, with the vote occupy, occupy, occupy.

The scorpion-----in its opal eyes-----guards the secrets-----of the immobile water.It tenaciously raises its tail of iron& its topaz sting reflects----the red lights of Mars,----the dark lights of Pluto.It hides behind the erect pole,---in the moist cave;it knows the secrets of the soul.

-October
12 is a feast-day known in various regions and times by many names:
Columbus Day, Discovery Day, Hispanic Culture Day, Day of the Americas,
Day of the Race, Day of the Indigenous Peoples.

In Mexico in 1928 at the insistence of the philosopher José Vasconcelos,
then Minister of Education, it was named Día de la Raza (Day of the
Race), denomination of the Iberian-American Union in 1913 to declare a
new identity formed by the encounter of the Spaniards with the native
peoples of the Americas. In 1902, the Mexican poet Amado Nervo had written a poem in honor of the President Benito Juárez (a Zapoteca Indian), which he read in the House of Representatives, titled La Raza de Bronce
(Race of Bronze) praising the indigenous race, title which later in
1919 the Bolivian author Alcides Arquedas would give his book. Bronze
(noble metal amalgamated of various metals) came to be metaphor for mestizaje
(the mixing of the races.) According to the thinking of Vasconcelos, a
Cosmic Race, the race of the future, is the noble race that is formed
in the Americas since October 12, 1492, the race of mestizaje,
an amalgam of the indigenous races of the Americas, the Europeans,
the Africans, the Asians, the world — in a word, the human race made
of a mixture of all the races which Vasconcelos called the Cosmic
Race.

But
that this race is formed at great cost to the indigenous American
peoples (and to the African peoples brought here as slaves) cannot be
ignored. Since 2002, in Venezuela the feast-day is called Día de la
Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance.)

Be
that as it may, by whatever name we give it, however way we cut it,
it is the same cake — the date commemorates the arrival of the
Europeans to America (which for them was a “new world”), not a visit
but an invasion, a genocide, a subjugation of the peoples of that “new
world” which we know today by the name of a European cartographer who
scarcely set foot on the sacred ground of the continents that bear
his name. What the date marks is a continuous colonization,
exploitation, abuse, outrage of the indigenous peoples of the Americas
that has scarcely lessened, that has persisted these five-hundred and
some years.

It
could well be called Day of Globalization. Since that date, the Earth
is concretely, definitively proven to be truly round, a sphere, a
ball, a globe. And from that date is imposed by force upon the
indigenous American peoples a quite strange (in my view, mistaken)
cosmology, attitude toward life, toward the Earth, toward economics,
toward the sacred, toward the human being him/herself — a single truth
narrow and intolerant, a rapacious disdain toward the Earth seen only
as a resource to be exploited, a concept of progress difficult to
distinguish from greed and the lust for power.

The
cause of the indigenous peoples screams for justice: their lands,
their fields continue to be stolen from them, destroyed for their
valuable woods and minerals; their agricultural creations, such as
maize and the potato, which have saved a great part of the world from
famine, are modified at the molecular level and controlled by
rapacious corporations; their traditional medicines are patented by
those same corporations; sacred water is privatized and stolen from
them; even their right to their own beliefs and cultures is not
respected. Even putting justice aside, we should all ally ourselves
with the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and of the entire world)
in their resistance against such abuse because what threatens them
threatens us all throughout the whole world — and the Earth itself.
They have a very much to teach us about a healthy relationship of
humankind with the Earth.

In
an Earth much smaller and more fragile than we imagined, we find
ourselves in full globalization and struggle against the imposition of
an unbridled capitalism and the fascism, its logical extension, that
accompanies it. The indigenous resistance that has never ceased these
five centuries and some continues in spite of a brutal repression and
now all of us of the cosmic race, of pure necessity, must align
ourselves with their struggle, for that struggle is ours if we are to
survive on the Earth, holy mother of our race, the human race — and of
all our relations, the other animals, the plants, the minerals. On the
round, seamless Earth all borders are fictitious and what threatens
one threatens all. To think otherwise is not only immoral but insane.